Quotes About Observation

And Avery looks up at just that moment and sees the blue-haired boy glancing his way. Some of us applaud. Others look away, because it hurts too much.

After tiny has tried ballerina pose, swing-batter-batter pose, pump-up-the-jam pose, and top-of-the-mountain-sound-of-music pose in the reflection of the bean, he walks us to a bench overlooking lake shore drive.

I find it hard to look at her. I know from experience that beneath every peripheral girl is a central truth.

We watch them grow, with sadness and amazement and fear. We have stepped away, but not entirely away. They know this. They sense it. We are no longer here, but we are not yet gone. And we will be like that for the rest of their lives. We watch, and they surprise us. We watch, and they surpass us.

His eyes are a little together, but man, are they green.

I try to get the basic facts, not the details. The details can be interesting, but they can also distract me into attachment. The worst thing in the world would be to pretend to know the people whose lives I step through. They cannot be homes to me. They must be hotel rooms.

I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

If you think about it hard enough, if you trace potential reverberations long enough, every step can be a false step, any move can lead to an unintended consequence. Who am I ignoring that I shouldn't be ignoring? What am I not saying that I should be saying? What won't I notice that she would absolutely notice? While I'm out in the public hallways, what private languages am I not hearing?

The way you're singing in your sleep The way you look before you leap The strange illusions that you keep You don't know But I'm noticing

I can tell from the glint in her eyes that she's at least an acquaintance of Dorothy.

The car can smile all it wants, but that doesn't mean you can see the driver's expression.

In my mind, there are two kinds of looking. There's the kind of looking that is respectful, almost magical, where you observe something without daring to touch it. And then there's the kind of looking that's like slurping a Coke.

It's that guy again, you'd say. Then: He's cute, you know. No, I don't know. And you don't need to tell me.

Going through the motions gives you plenty of time to examine the motions

I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story but passing by too quickly to notice or understand

Tony knows the names of trees and birds. As we walk around, he points them out to me. I try to record them in my mind, but the information never holds. What matters to me is the emotional meaning of the objects.

How genius to call them thumbnails, because what part of the body tells us less?

The part I enjoy most is not the doing, but the noticing. Noticing the way she smells like oversugared coffee, and the difference between her smile and her photographed smile, and the way she bites her lower lip, and the pale skin of her back. I just want the pleasure of noticing these things at a safe distance-I don't want to have to acknowledge I am noticing.

But we haven't been there for you. We've been here. Watching as you become the role models.

I'd thought I remembered her perfectly. But it is much better to see her imperfectly, to see something new every time she moves.

He points to a hot guy in a skintight yellow tank top—or some such article of clothing. You know, the kind where the guy looks more naked than if he were actually naked?

This is how it feels to hold a pencil in her hand. This is how it feels to fill her lungs with air. This is how it feels to press her back against the chair. This is how it feels to touch her ear. This is what the world sounds like to her. This is what she hears every day.

There are two kinds of drivers, he thinks: those who see the world around the road, and those who fixate on the road itself. We'll end up where we want to be. We always do.

She is sitting right next to me. I want to run my finger along her arm. I want to kiss her neck. I want to whisper the truth in her ear. But instead I watch as she conjugates verbs. I listen as the air is filled with a foreign language, spoken in haphazard bursts. I try to sketch her in my notebook, but I am not an artist, and all that comes out are the wrong shapes, the wrong lines. I cannot hold onto anything that's her.